News - Local News

POSTED: Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2008

State looks into engineering firm's vice president

BELLINGHAM - The state Department of Licensing is looking into whether a local geophysics firm's vice president did engineering work that requires a license he does not hold.

Matthew C. Ringstad claimed an educational background he doesn't have from at least one college and also appears on a list of people who may have purchased a fake degree from a diploma mill in Spokane. He used his work e-mail address at Apollo Geophysics to communicate with the diploma mill, according to a reporter at the Spokane Spokesman-Review, which initially released the federal government's list of more than 9,800 people who may have purchased fake degrees.

Ringstad will not return phone calls or e-mails from a reporter about the issue, nor will his wife, Lynn Ringstad, who is the owner and president of Apollo Geophysics, located on East Holly Street.

But now the state Department of Licensing is investigating whether or not he violated the law.

"We're concerned about it," said Christine Anthony, Department of Licensing spokeswoman. "We're certainly going to look into it to see if he did cross any of those lines, if he was doing engineering work."

Part of the issue for the state, however, is that Ringstad is in a bit of a "gray area" in terms of what he says his background is in, Anthony said. On an application to the city of Bellingham that gained the engineering firm an on-call consultant contract, Ringstad said he had a degree in computer science from Whitman College in Walla Walla. But Whitman says he went there for only one year and never picked a major. He told a reporter from The News Tribune in Tacoma that he had a degree in political science from a college in California, but wouldn't say from where.

Ringstad never claimed to be a licensed geologist, only that he was a geophysicist, which isn't a licensed profession.

But, Anthony said, engineering geologists and geotechnical engineers are licensed. Now the state has to figure out if the work he did might fit those licensed professions, she said.

Meanwhile, the city of Bellingham continues to have the company's contract on hold, though no determination has been made whether to cancel it, Mayor Dan Pike said. That's mainly because city Public Works Director Dick McKinley, who was looking into the issue, is on vacation.

Western Washington University geology professor Bernie Housen said that an educational background for the type of work Ringstad has listed on applications is important, especially when dealing with certain geological hazards.

"Geology can be quite complicated, and in such situations the additional knowledge gained via education enables you to better recognize situations where the geophysical data can be misleading, or even invalid," Housen said.

On the city application, Ringstad claimed he did seismic hazard assessment work at the Hanford nuclear site as well as consulting work on 2005 renovations to the old Federal Building in downtown Bellingham.

Housen said that Ringstad should have been OK doing some work, but it would depend on the extent that his wife, Lynn Ringstad, who has bachelor's and master's degrees in geology and is a state licensed geologist, oversaw work he did.

Housen believes that, as the vice president of a company, Ringstad should be expected to "hold the proper license and credential for that profession."

"The fact that he is not raises some significant questions, which I guess is the gist of this whole issue," Housen said.

Reach Sam Taylor at sam.taylor@bellinghamherald.com or call 715-2263. Read his Politics Blog at TheBellinghamHerald.com/blogs.